Hello! Welcome to my Italian 203 Portfolio, Enjoy!

Well, here we are: the end of my third semester of Italian here at Duke.  I took Latin for eight years and prior to coming to college had never studied a spoken language.  Upon entering Italian 101 I was nervous to say the least.  However, over the past year and a half I feel that I have grown and strengthened the muscle in brain for processing new languages and new cultures and ideals.  While I enjoyed Italian 101 and 102, it was not until this semester in 203 that I have learned to truly love the Italian language.
In this class, we don’t only learn the language, the vocabulary and the grammar, but we also apply these new diction and syntax rules to culture.  We learned to compare cultures, analyze traditions and ideals and assess the effects that studying and immersing oneself in a new culture can have.  I have found this not only to be a skill that is useful in terms of my knowledge of Italian language and culture, but also a skill that I can apply when I encounter all other new cultures as well.
Creating this portfolio acted as a perfect means to reflect upon my Italian 203 journey.  The class began with a unit on food.  While I do love food, especially Italian food, I found it to be very interesting and enlightening how learning about the food of a culture could tell you so much more about it.  I focused my poster project on Italian food in America and particularly the restaurant Olive Garden.  American’s have not only entirely changed traditional Italian cuisine, but have also invented new dishes that are not served at all in Italy and labeled them as “Italian”. In a world we are constantly discussing cultural appropriation and the rights that one culture has to take an others customs as its own, I found this to be a particularly relevant topic.  Through our exploration of food I learned about many other aspects of Italian culture as well.  This was almost entirely due to the structure of our class in which small groups would work together to create a project and then would present their project to the class. This was extremely useful because I was exposed to many different topics and ways of approaching a prompt.  Learning from the other students in my class was one of the highlights of Italian 203 for me personally.
The next unit we covered in Italian 203 regarded museums and more generally, descriptions of buildings and space. This unit interested me because we got hands on learning experience through our visit to the Nasher. At the Nasher Museum we had the chance to speak Italian to someone fluent in the language.  We had to rely on our proficiency in the language to ask questions and complete our project on what we would change about the museum.  This, along with the interview that we conducted in the third and final unit of the class, I found to be the most useful exercises of the class.  In each of these exercises our Italian language skills were put to the test.  We had to think on our feet and apply our knowledge of Italian vocabulary, grammar and culture in order to communicate with and learn from others.  I found this to be the essence of Italian 203, a class that combined a collaborative work environment with a desire to truly immerse the students into Italian tradition and culture.